How Xbox One Could Be Xbox Won

Wired has an excellent writeup of the new Xbox One. It was just revealed to the public yesterday, but Peter Rubin got to spend some quality time with one over the last few weeks -- the lucky bastard. It's an impressive piece of hardware, like any new console should be. But here's what I think makes it a winner:

When the 360 launched, smartphones hadn’t yet trickled out of the corporate world; Netflix was strictly a DVD delivery service; the “cloud” was something that got in the way of a suntan. (Hell, in 2005, people suntanned.) And a big part of the 360’s longevity was Microsoft’s ability not only to develop games but also to forge partnerships that took advantage of these new staples of online life. So as those deals proliferated, so did the things the Xbox 360 could do. People played Halo 3 on their Xbox, but they also watched Netflix. They bought Kinect sensors for controller-free experiences, but they also burned through seasons of Deadwood on HBO Go and caught sports highlights on an ESPN app. But all of this new functionality was built on patches and firmware updates. The 360 simply wasn’t constructed that way, so when the Xbox One was greenlit in the fall of 2011, “the decision wasn’t, ‘We need a gamebox,’” Whitten says. “It was, ‘We need a living-room experience.’” Built that way from the ground up.

This is Microsoft playing at the absolute top of its game (no pun intended). They've leveraged everything they've learned about gaming, consoles, services, and streaming, and worked them together into a single system. To call the Xbox One a mere "console" is to undersell what it is and what it does. This is an entertainment system-in-a-box, all for a few hundred dollars.

How was Microsoft able to do this, when they've pretty much flubbed every single other consumer device they've tried to build in the last few years? How did the company that build the ill-fated Zune with its infamous "Squirt" feature manage to get something so spectacularly right?